[Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

Mon Nov 9 09:47:23 PST 2015

I strongly disagree with the statement Ian makes that the smaller the institution, the more sense the Big Deals make. The kicker of course is “if you can afford them”. Smaller institutions, by and large, CAN’T afford them.

I’ve posted about it before and I will mention it again. What about pay-per-view? Pay-per-view (PPV) makes sense for some institutions like ours. We cancelled Big Deals with Wiley, Sage, and Elsevier, and implemented selected, title-by-title subscriptions instead, with access to everything else published by those publishers via PPV. In the case of Elsevier and Wiley, this includes ebooks as well. We have a lot more flexibility and perhaps most importantly, control, over a significant portion of our acquisitions budget as a result. And our users have enthusiastically embraced the dramatically expanded access while our library has enjoyed the dramatically lower cost.

I’ve spoken about our experience at several venues including the just-concluded Charleston Conference.

Steve

Steve Oberg<http://www.wheaton.edu/Academics/Faculty/O/Steve-Oberg>
Assistant Professor of Library Science
Electronic Resources and Serials
Wheaton College (IL)
+1 (630) 752-5852

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>> on behalf of Ian Gibson <igibson at brocku.ca<mailto:igibson at brocku.ca>>
Date: Monday, November 9, 2015 at 11:33 AM
To: Melissa Belvadi <mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>>, "Harker, Karen" <Karen.Harker at unt.edu<mailto:Karen.Harker at unt.edu>>
Cc: "eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>" <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>>, Colleen A McGhee-French <cmcghee at wellesley.edu<mailto:cmcghee at wellesley.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

Agree with Melissa and IMO the smaller you are the more sense the big deals make (if you can afford them).

We broke a consortially brokered big deal last year when the Canadian Dollar tanked. After making some other more strategic cancellations this year, we were hoping to rejoin that deal through the consortium but at a price closer to what our closest peer comparators were paying (for this particular deal our historic spend was higher than our peers). Not surprisingly, the publisher wasn’t interested in playing ball on that, as it wouldn’t be fair to the other consortia members who’ve stuck with the deal. Our decision was to reinstate the bare minimum number of subscriptions* which should reduce our expenditure with this publisher by about 55%.

We remain amenable to rejoining the big deal if the publisher ever develops a pricing model that has like institutions paying like prices.

I do not anticipate that this will please our users, who have become accustomed to the all you can eat big deal smorgasbord, but the bottom line is that this will provide us with budget flexibility for the next few years to improve funding to the things that matter – Special Collections, OA, Data, etc.

*in this case it will be about 35 titles decided by use (so mostly social sciences) – I could have easily made a case for about 100 other titles but the goal here was cost reduction.

Ian Gibson, MISt
Collections Librarian
Brock University | James A. Gibson Library
Niagara Region  |  500 Glenridge Ave.  |  St. Catharines, Ontario  L2S 3A1
Eigibson at brocku.ca<mailto:igibson at brocku.ca>| T  905 688 5550  x6223  | @IanGibson11

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From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Monday, November 9, 2015 11:33 AM
To: Harker, Karen
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>; Colleen A McGhee-French
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

I was just at the Charleston Conference where I heard a member of the audience at one session complain about having to pay for unused titles in a Big Deal package.
I thought it reflected a lack of understanding of what a Big Deal actually is.

So I want to emphasize something Karen says here: "when we calculated the alternative of subscribing to the most used titles, would be more economical to split up".

Whenever I've done an analysis on our Big Deals that are based on historic spend, I find that the titles in our "core" (the basis for our price) are indeed by far the most heavily used. And the smaller price we pay for "'all of the rest" is still very cost effective to have access to that long tail. That is, our cost per full text article used in the long tail is still well within our internal threshold for renewing journals, either in packages or individually.

The important point here is to actually do that analysis, and don't think of the titles in the package that you don't use as "wasted money".
You are paying a pittance per "all the rest" journal relative to their retail cost exactly because your use of them is expected to be very low and take the form of that "long tail" distribution.

Melissa Belvadi

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Harker, Karen <Karen.Harker at unt.edu<mailto:Karen.Harker at unt.edu>> wrote:
We’ve been going through this process for the last several years.  We evaluated every journal package in terms of overall use, overall cost-per-use, cost per title, CPU for each title, distribution of use across titles (as in 80% of uses were for what % of titles), and the list-price CPU.

There were some packages which were clearly not good deals.  These were packages where the distribution of usage across titles was very limited (80% of uses were from < 15% of titles), and which, when we calculated the alternative of subscribing to the most used titles, would be more economical to split up.

There were other packages which clearly were a good deal – low overall CPU, high distribution of usage across titles, and, most importantly, they were affordable.  These we continued.

Then there are those packages which were a good deal, but were unaffordable to continue.  These were the biggest of the big deals.  These were the hardest to cut.  By any measure, attempting to subscribe to the better-performing titles individually would have exceeded the cost of the package.  But, taken as a single source of expenditures, they were unsustainable.  It was only after making these cuts (and explaining our intention to have to cut the biggest of the big deals) that the library was appropriated more funds.  But this is only temporary…no more than 3 years.  This decision will have to be revisited.

The point it, breaking up a well-performing package is very, very hard to do.  At some point, you have to cut titles that have very low CPU’s or otherwise are a good value.  It’s like getting very heavy mortgage at a very low rate.  Yes, it’s a good deal, but if you don’t have the money in the budget, you have to pass on it.

Karen Harker
Collection Assessment Librarian
940-565-2688<tel:940-565-2688>
Libraries are for Use<http://librariesareforuse.wordpress.com/>

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>] On Behalf Of Colleen A McGhee-French
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 10:05 AM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Is Breaking Up THAT Hard to Do?

Hi all,

I tried searching the archives of this list, but perhaps I am not doing it correctly. I couldn't find any discussion of the idea of/implementation of/success with breaking up journal packages.

Yet I would think we all have them - huge, huge journal packages, each containing more than 1200 or so journals, only a fraction of which are important/used - sometimes very important/highly used, each also containing hundreds of journals that we're paying for that have not been used in the last several years, at least to our knowledge.

Has your institution thought about this? Tried it? Succeeded/failed at it, and why? What were the largest obstacles to success?

Or has your institution thought about it and figured, Hey - the very important journals are used SO MUCH that the package overall is actually fairly economical and that those are the journals to concentrate on (rather than the huge number of unused journals)?

Thoughts?

Colleen

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--
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca> 902-566-0581

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